“Sure, what?”
“Just so our records’ll be complete, I’d like you to draw up a short report on that kid’s mental state the last couple a days. Nothin’ extensive… whenever you have the time. Right now, I’m gonna show you where to get the best quiche in New Orleans.”
At a pleasant little restaurant with pink tablecloths and a small bouquet of fresh flowers on each table, Broussard attacked his quiche with gusto. Still haunted by the awful image and tawdry circumstances of the hanging she’d seen less than a half hour ago, Kit could do no more than pick at her food.
Aware that their absence would be questioned by the proprietor where they usually ate lunch, Broussard paused between bites and said, “I’m gonna let you tell Grandma O why we weren’t there today.”
Grandma O. Yikes. Kit looked at her watch.
“What’s the matter?” Broussard asked, his fork poised at his lips.
“I’ve got to meet someone at Grandma O’s at two and it’s already quarter past one.”
Broussard signaled for the check and Kit was off to meet Lily Lacaze.
7
A quick stop at an ATM to get the fifty dollars she had promised Lacaze and Kit walked through the door of Grandma O’s with three minutes to spare. Always packed from 11:10 to 1:45, the place was now nearly empty, the only customers a touristy-looking couple in Rockport walking shoes who were poring over a map. Never one to relax, Grandma O was up on a stepladder behind the bar, using a Dustbuster to vacuum the stuffed armadillos and nutrias on the ledge above the mirror. When she saw Kit, she turned off the Dustbuster and came down, her flared black taffeta dress catching on the ladder, the bar, and her stock of liquor. She patted and pushed her dress back where it belonged and came from behind the bar, her huge hips and the dress claiming a considerable proportion of the restaurant’s floor space.
“You takin’ lunch kinda late today,” she said. “An’ where’s city boy?” “City boy” was what she called Broussard.
“We sort of had lunch already,” Kit said. Grandma O’s black eyes flashed. “We were out on a case and it got so late…”
“An’ how was it?” Grandma O said, her thinly penciled brows raised in warning.
Well aware that she wasn’t asking about the case, Kit said, “Compared with your cooking… no contest.”
Grandma O’s lips spread in a wide grin, the light flashing off the gold star inlay in her front tooth. She laughed, a cackle that made the tourists look up from their map.
“So Ah guess now you want some real food?”
“Actually, I’ve arranged to meet someone here… if that’s all right.”
“Course it is. You welcome here anytime. Ah’m surprised you didn’ know dat. Go on back to your table and Ah’ll get you a glass of iced tea. You boun’ to have a need for some tea, hot as it is out dere.”
While Grandma O rustled off to get the tea, Kit threaded her way through the restaurant’s round marble-topped tables to one that was larger than the rest. She took the seat next to the wall so she could keep her eye on the door. Seconds later, a skinny woman wearing white clamdiggers, a wrinkled white blouse, and Dr. Scholl’s clogs came in. She took a quick look around and headed for the big table.
“I’m Lacaze,” she said in a rattly voice Kit recognized from their phone conversation.
She had peculiar coppery blotches on her neck and wore a reddish purple lipstick that looked as though it would glow in the dark. Hair curlers poked at the dirty pink scarf on her head. What at first appeared to be a birthmark on her right cheek Kit now saw was a small tattoo of a daisy.
“One of those things that don’t seem like such a good idea the next mornin’,” Lacaze said, reading Kit’s mind. She pulled out a chair, sat down, and plopped a black clutch bag on the table. “You got the fifty?” she said, reaching into her bag.
“Yes.”
Lacaze brought out a box of thin little cigars and put one in her mouth. She lit it with a plastic lighter, blew some smoke at the ceiling, then took the cigar out of her mouth and picked some tobacco off her tongue. “I ain’t seein’ any green.”
“You show me yours and I’ll show you mine,” Kit said.
Lacaze studied Kit for a few seconds through shallow, vacant eyes that looked as though their fuse had blown. She produced a narrow strip of photographs from her bag and flipped them onto the table. Kit picked them up.
They were bus station snapshots of two women mugging for the camera—one of them a startlingly young Lily Lacaze sans tattoo and the other clearly the face in French’s reconstruction. Kit looked for a date on the back but found none.
“Ain’t that her?” Lacaze said self-importantly, blowing smoke at the ceiling.
Grandma O rustled out of the kitchen and put Kit’s iced tea in front of her. She looked at Lacaze. “Anything Ah can get for you?”
“That bar there just for looks?”
Grandma O did not believe that the customer was always right but, rather, judged the correctness of a customer’s position on an issue by how closely it reflected her own. Nor was she partial to wiseacres. Kit was therefore not surprised when Grandma O puffed up like a toad and said, “Ain’t nothin’ in here jus’ for looks.”
“A Bloody Mary, then,” Lacaze said. “You know how to make one?”
Grandma O seemed to grow even larger. “Ah’ll jus’ muddle through an’ if Ah get it wrong, you be sure an’ tell me.”
Lacaze watched Grandma O rustle over to the bar. She blew more smoke at the ceiling and looked at Kit. “What’s with her, she can’t act civil toward somebody? You satisfied with the picture?”
“Yes. What can you tell me about her?”
Lacaze put out her hand. Kit got two twenties and a ten out of her purse and put them in Lacaze’s palm. “Francie O’Connor was what she called herself,” Lacaze said, tucking the bills into her bag. “But I never saw no proof that was her real name. Wouldn’t say where she was from, but sometimes she’d buy a Dallas newspaper, so you figure it out.”
“Was she on the street… a hooker?”
Lacaze’s eyes narrowed. “You probably think there’s somethin’ wrong with that. Only difference between girls on the street and you starchy little suburbanites is that workin’ girls know what it’s worth. They don’t give it away.” She wrinkled her nose. “Damn, I’m gettin’ blocked up again.”
She fished a tube of Preparation H out of her bag, squeezed some onto her little finger, and thrust it up one nostril, a trick Kit recognized as one druggies use to heal the damage cocaine does to their nasal lining. Lacaze repeated the procedure on the other nostril and put the tube back in her bag. “Only thing that works,” she said. “All that spray and shit just makes it worse.”
Grandma O brought the Bloody Mary and left it without comment.
“Here’s to suburbia,” Lacaze said, raising her glass. She took a long pull at her drink and another drag on her cigar.
“Francie O’Connor…” Kit said, nudging Lacaze back to the subject.
“Yeah, Francie worked the streets, but she didn’t let it harden her. You take a lot of girls, they hit the bricks, they get—what’s the word?—cyn—”
“Cynical?”
“What’s the matter, you couldn’t wait for a person to get it themselves? Yeah, cynical. But Francie didn’t. She was always real upbeat, like she thought she had a future or somethin’. Then one night, she just up and vanished. I seen her about eleven o’clock at Royal and St. Anne. We shot the shit for a while and then split up. I never saw her again. Her landlady said she never even came back for her clothes.”
“If you were her friend, why didn’t you go to the police?”
“Me and the cops never exactly been on speakin’ terms. An’ it wasn’t like this was anything real unusual. I knew lotsa girls who were there one day and gone the next. Some bum sweet-talks ’em into goin’ off to New York or L.A., they split. Thing is, on the street, somewhere else always sounds better’n where you are.”
> “But how many others left their clothes behind?”
“Mor’n you’d think.”
“But Francie didn’t leave town…”
“No she didn’t… poor kid. You know what she liked mor’n anything? Mardi Gras. Girl was nuts for parades or a band. If there wasn’t nothin’ but a horse left in a parade, she’d stand there till it passed. Had a dream that someday she’d ride on one of those floats. Instead, she got killed. I don’t guess there’s any Mardi Gras where she’s been.”
“Did Francie have any enemies?”
“Who doesn’t? But none that ever threatened her, if that’s what you mean.”
“How about a pimp, mad at her for something… wanting to teach her a lesson?”
Lacaze shook her head. “Back then, it was all right to free-lance. There was so much business, nobody worried about new talent workin’ solo.”
“Did she have any regular customers?”
Lacaze downed half of her remaining Bloody Mary and blotted her mouth with a napkin. “She didn’t want regulars… preferred to do it all anonymously.”
“So whoever killed her likely just pulled up at the curb, she got in, and that was it?”
“Like I said, anonymously. Whoever killed her, she probably had never seen ’em before.” Lacaze finished her drink and took another drag on her cigar.
“When did Francie disappear?”
“Early sixties, like I said on the phone.”
“Could you be more specific?”
“Not about somethin’ happened that long ago.”
“Can you give me the name of anyone else that I might talk to about her?”
Lacaze shook her head again. “Look, I gotta go. I’d like to help more, but I’m dry. Thanks for the fifty. Hope you catch the shit that did it. See you.” Lacaze got up and started to leave, then paused. “What will they do with her… what’s left of her? Will there be a funeral or anything?”
The question caught Kit by surprise. It was something that had not crossed her mind. “I don’t really know.”
Lacaze nodded. “I probably wouldn’t go, anyway.”
Kit watched Lacaze clomp out the door, then picked up the strip of pictures and studied them. She had hoped that Lacaze would give her a few leads, point her toward some other contacts. That hadn’t happened, but she had gotten a little insight into the victim, some photographs of her, and her name. That was worth fifty bucks. Francie was now not only more real to Kit but would no longer have to face eternity as anonymously as she had lived.
“Somethin’ wrong with your tea?” Grandma O said ominously.
If you didn’t finish what Grandma O served, you had to have a good reason. Rather than try to explain, Kit simply picked up the glass and drained it.
“Hope Ah wasn’ too tough on your friend,” Grandma O said. “Ah tried to hold back.”
“She wasn’t a friend, just somebody I wanted information from.”
“Sure wish Ah’da known dat,” Grandma O said, staring wistfully at the door.
Upon her return to the hospital, Kit called the conveyance office and coaxed the woman she’d met there to look up the name of the notary involved in the sale of her house to Shirley Guillot. The woman returned with the name Harry Isom. Kit gushed her thanks, hung up, and flipped to the attorneys in the Yellow Pages, hoping that Harry Isom was still alive.
She found a listing for the firm of Isom and Loscovitz and learned from their secretary that the senior partner was indeed named Harry and that he specialized in real estate law. But unfortunately, he was out of town for a few days. Kit left her name and number with a request for Isom to call her when he returned.
*
* *
Kit saw the hanged teenager again as he was the moment she had first laid eyes on him. In his bed, Francie O’Connor and Leslie Music lay with the covers tucked under their chins, their lifeless eyes staring at the ceiling. Lily Lacaze was there as well, taking pictures with a camera that spit out strips of bus station photos.
Kit moaned and rolled over. Beside the bed, Lucky’s ears lifted and his eyes opened in alarm. Kit moaned again and Lucky jumped onto the bed. With his paw, he nudged her shoulder until she woke and put her arm around him.
“It’s okay, varmint,” she said sleepily. “I was just having a dream. Everything is fine.”
Outside, a car slowed in front of Kit’s house, its driver staring at her front door, the third time he’d been past in the last half hour. It was a fruitless activity, stupid even, but he was so empty and cold inside, and so afraid, he couldn’t help himself.
*
* *
The next morning, while Kit was opening a can of Alpo beef chunks for Lucky, she knocked a fork off the counter into the space between the counter and the fridge. Bending down to get it, she saw the pill that Lucky had failed to swallow.
“Why you sneaky little monster.” She turned and saw Lucky hauling his little brown behind through the crack in the kitchen door as fast as he could.
Since the direct approach had failed, Kit decided this time to be sneaky herself. With a steak knife she cut a small slot in a beef chunk and slipped Lucky’s pill inside. She hid the doctored morsel under some others and went to get him.
He attacked his food without hesitation, proving that humans are far smarter than even the cleverest little dog. While Lucky ate, Kit went into the bathroom and made a few adjustments to the combs in her hair and put on some lip gloss, thinking how glad she was that it was Friday. Just one more day until she would see…
Her thoughts were interrupted by the sound of the telephone. She hurried into the hall and picked up the receiver.
“Just read the article in yesterday’s paper,” a familiar voice said. “And I thought you might need some moral support.”
“Teddy. I was just thinking about you.”
“I’m surprised you can think of anything but that skeleton.”
“It was a shock at first, but I’m handling it okay now,” Kit said, seeing no point in telling him how rocky she still felt.
“Get any leads from the story?”
“A small one, but it didn’t go far.”
“We still on for tomorrow?”
“Of course. How was your trip?”
“I think I accomplished something. I’m just sorry I wasn’t with you Saturday.”
“You can make it up to me tomorrow.”
“I’ll certainly try. See you then. Take care.”
*
* *
With Harry Isom out of town and several hundred Guillots waiting for her in the phone book, Kit decided to work on the hanging case from the day before. From the victim’s mother, she got the names of some of his friends and spent the morning tracking them down. By noon, she felt she had all she needed. By 2:30, her report was finished and she went to Broussard’s office to deliver it.
When she opened Broussard’s door, she found Charlie Franks, the lanky deputy medical examiner, sitting on the edge of the table that held Broussard’s microscope, his long arms folded over his chest. Ordinarily a man who seemed never to have a bad day, Franks looked as though the odds had finally caught up with him.
“So if it could happen to Babe Ruth,” Broussard said to Franks, “it could happen to anyone.”
A Babe Ruth story.
Incredibly, Franks was getting a Babe Ruth story, something Broussard dispensed only when someone had really screwed up and he was trying to make them feel better. Having been Ruthed on two occasions herself, she knew exactly how Franks felt.
“Sorry to interrupt,” she said.
“It’s okay,” Broussard replied. “Charlie was just leavin’.”
On his way out, Franks waved a couple of fingers limply at Kit and mumbled something she couldn’t understand.
Broussard shifted the lemon ball in his mouth from one cheek to the other and rocked back in his chair, his hands folded over his belly. “What’s up?”
“Here’s the report on that sexual asphyxia
case.” She dropped the folder on the desk. “There’s no evidence he was suicidal.”
“How’d your meetin’ at Grandma O’s go yesterday?”
“Not too bad. I found someone that knew the victim. Her name was Francie O’Connor and you were right, she was a prostitute. I also got some pictures of her.” Kit dug in her handbag and handed the photos to Broussard.
“French came pretty close, didn’t she?” he said, looking at them.
“Very close.”
“Who’s the other girl?”
“The one who gave me the pictures. She’s changed some since they were taken.”
“Haven’t we all.”
“Unfortunately, she couldn’t or wouldn’t steer me to anyone else who knew Francie.”
“You check on the real estate notary?”
“Got a name, but he’s out of town for a few days. I was wondering… what will happen to Francie’s remains… after this is all over?”
“Anthropologists love to dig things up, but they hate to bury ’em. If no relative comes forward to arrange burial, Victoria’ll just keep ’em.”
“Why?”
Broussard shrugged. “It’s evidence. Even when a case appears to be closed, sometimes later, questions pop up….”
“That seems sad… to keep her on a shelf.”
“Believe me, Victoria’ll take good care of her… better than the parish would if she was sent to potter’s field. To change the subject, you think your appetite’ll be better Monday night than it was yesterday at lunch?”
“Why?”
“Before Charlie came in, I had a conference call with the other five members of my gourmet club and they wanted me to invite you to our annual dinner this Monday at my place. We always invite someone who’s been in the news recently, to liven up the conversation.”
“Was inviting me your idea?”
“Actually, no. Someone else mentioned your name and the others, includin’ me, agreed.”
“How nice.”
“The short notice doesn’t tell you anything?”
“What do you mean?”
“Nothin’. Forget it.”
“Fat chance. Give.”
No Mardi Gras for the Dead Page 7